


on a balcony in New Berlin

by cirque



Category: Original Work
Genre: Non-Linear Narrative, Present Tense, Time Loop, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:53:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28269429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/pseuds/cirque
Summary: It is hard, when one knows the end of the story, not to spoil it.
Relationships: Ancient Goddess of Time/Female Time Traveller from High Tech Future
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2020





	on a balcony in New Berlin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KannaOphelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KannaOphelia/gifts).



Aroa is ageless. Kumiko is ten, Kumiko is forty-six, Kumiko is dead. Aroa is watching her birth, even as she mourns her passing. Aroa is powerless; she is no meddler in events. That power is not known to her, will never be known to her. What is dead must die, what is lost must stay. She is not meant to get attached.

Kumiko is waist-deep in the Red Sea, fishing for treasures. The Earth has long since died, and Kumiko’s treasures are bullets and immortal plastic, electronic chips, human bones. She catches a metacarpal and holds it up proudly. Aroa cannot help her laugh.

Kumiko is six years old and crying. It is her first day of school and the kids have circled around her, yelling slurs. Aroa cannot bear to look.

Kumiko is making her first jump through time. Aroa is busy in the stars, in the ether, in the little spaces between atoms where music likes to sing. She is formless and flowing, a tiny speck then a monstrous giant, she is everywhere all at once; it is a lot. She is busy doing nothing, busy guarding her realm, busy supping on dark matter, which was ever a drug to her.

They will meet soon and Aroa’s life will truly begin.

The story warps. She cannot remember how it began, though it is long since over. Aroa has buried her love, has planted trees on her grave that have long since turned to carbon, has made a jewel of the diamonds that bloom beneath the forest.

“I love this,” Kumiko says in Edwardian England. They are dressed for the occasion. Aroa only ever seems to adopt a mortal form when she is around Kumiko. The dresses were her idea. Aroa finds the bones of the corset pinch at her chest. Is it meant to be so? It feels strange, sort of squashy, and she wonders how the humans manage it. 

They lounge on a patch of grass, basking in the warmth like cats in a sunbeam.

“What?” she asks.

Kumiko considers her reply for several long moments. Time ticks away. Aroa wants to grab hold of it, but it is like catching smoke, like grains of sand falling through an hourglass. There they are on their wet ruined planet, clinging to what little land it offers as they hurtle through space.

“All of this,” Kumiko insists, “Everything. Traveling through time with you. Seeing so much, learning so much. It’s… everything I ever wanted, and more.”

“Oh,” is all Aroa can manage.

“Thank you for choosing me.”

“I didn’t _choose_ you.”

“Right. We’re soulmates.”

“Something like that.”

* * *

It is rare, then, that time surprises her. The loop was one such time. She followed Kumiko through a hole in the universe, a little thready gap that was leaking radiation, probably, and likely burning up a star to keep itself open. But there it was, a _nothingness._ A black, inviting nothingness.

She remembers the end before she’s begun. She ought to tell Kumiko (“stay out, stay safe!”) but she does not, because she is ancient and innumerable and she has been taught not to meddle in the lives of mortals. Even space-faring time-hopping loved ones. But still, she recognises it now, and she should have seen it coming a mile off.

“This is odd… ” Kumiko says from the other side, and Aroa follows her through, because what else can she do? She is in mortal form, fragile but solid. Her touch will not harm Kumiko, and that is how she likes it.

“What’s odd?” Aroa says, though she knows. Of course she knows.

“I don't--” the bullets pierce her flimsy spacesuit, peppering her midriff. The gunshots are not fatal, not immediately, but the spacesuit’s loss of pressure chokes her of oxygen in a matter of seconds. She is gasping, clutching her chest.

She falls, hard, and Aroa rushes to her side, taking that thin gloved hand in her own. There is blood everywhere. Aroa can hardly grip her.

“It’s okay,” she says, “it’s not forever. We’re stuck in a time loop. I’ll stop it next time, but you had to realise. It’s a trap.”

Kumiko nods and chokes, trying to speak. Nothing Aroa can say can ease the pain of death. It’s designed to hurt.

* * *

Kumiko is running her hand along the inner walls of Khufu’s Great Pyramid. It is dark but for the flickering unsteadiness of the torches they hold aloft. Bits of ash keep dripping between Aroa’s feet and the stink of lighter fuel is in the air, which is already clogged with limestone dust. Humans are strange, Aroa decides.

“Can you believe this?” Kumiko giggles. She picks up a discarded shovel. “The _actual_ tools used by Sir Flinders Petrie himself.” There’s a screwed-up piece of paper in one corner. Kumiko unfolds it with reverence: inside it bears a game of hangman, lost beyond hope.

“Anyone else would be glad to see the pyramid itself.” Aroa points out, and Kumiko _tuts._

“I saw this darned thing being built,” Kumiko laughs. “But the explorations, you can’t beat that. The amazement they must have felt, the awe, taking these measurements for the very first time. No X-Rays, no thermal imaging, just straight up… digging.”

“You’re… interested in the tools?”

“Very!” Kumiko has a look of pure glee on her face. It is quite endearing. “Tools let us see how humans functioned, and generally they’ve functioned the same way for thousands of years. And--we now know--will continue to do so for many thousands more. It’s like someone measuring out their kid’s height on the wall in pen: here we are, at this moment in time, we’re human.”

Mortals, Aroa is coming to understand, are strange beings indeed. They are so finite, so destined to die young, and yet so very unique. She could meet a million and never get bored.

* * *

“It’s a time loop?” Kumiko asks.

Aroa nods. She has seconds, perhaps, until their assailants are upon them again. She does not intend to repeat the last time. She hopes for cover.

“Yeah,” she says, thinking, thinking.

“Are those a thing?” 

Aroa stops, and laughs. “You travel through time wily-nily, making mincemeat of the universe, and you’re surprised at _this_?”

“Right. Sorry. Perspective. So: time loop?”

They step through the portal together and Aroa instantly drags her to the left, out of the field of vision of the assailants who lurk some fifty metres away on a hillock. They are standing in a field of purple grass, with a great house that spans much of the horizon. It is a citadel, made of black shiny stone and lit from within by a rainbow of lights.

Aroa drags Kumiko down behind a low wall. 

“Yes,” Aroa says, “Time loops. They’re real, apparently.”

“Isn’t this in your job description?”

“Sometimes the universe likes to mess with us. Evidently.”

Kumiko flinches as a strange sort of spider lollops across the wall, bade for the crack in the bricks in which it has probably laid its eggs. It is a mechanical thing, a shiny silver-bodied droid coated in solar panels and, Aroa sighs, a camera inlaid into its cephalothorax. It is graceless, probably outdated by several models, but it succeeds in transmitting their image back to its masters.

“So,” Aroa groans. “They know we’re here.”

“Who’s ‘they’? I’m lost.”

Aroa racks her memory. Things are starting to blur. It must be the radiation, it clogs her brain. “The people of this planet.”

“We’re on a different planet?”

“You think we can only travel in time?”

“Oh. Right. Yeah.”

“They’re the inhabitants of this planet. They’re stepping through the portal and mining the worlds beyond for ore, diamonds, gold, platinum, uranium--pretty much anything they can’t get on their own planet. They’re getting hungrier and hungrier though, and some local god has taken a dislike to their appetites. Hence: the time loop. They’re stuck fighting against the sundry creatures that come spilling forth from the portal. They die, they live, they die. Over and over.”

“Great. And how can we break the cycle? I’m already getting claustrophobic.”

“True love,” says Aroa, as though it is the simplest thing in the world and, to her, it is. “The god is a minor fellow, a simple being. I can read his work, pick apart what he has woven for us. It will be sated by an act of the truest love, pure selflessness that can calm its rage.”

“Oh,” Kumiko smiles, “it’s a good thing you’ve got me, then.”

It is early in their relationship. Kumiko is still young, still hot-headed, perhaps not ready for exploring the universe just yet. Aroa is ever patient. They have yet to kiss in this timeline. Aroa is not keen to rush her, she understands that humans live such odd little lives.

“You don’t love me,” Aroa says.

“Yet,” is Kumiko’s input.

“But--”

“You’ve told me everything. So what if I don’t love you right now? I’ll love you eventually, yeah? Forever and a day. We’ve only just met five years ago.”

“My point exactly. To you our love is but a story, some far-fetched tale you only half believe in. Time will bring your love out, yes, but we are stuck _now._ We don’t have time to wait for you to realise it.”

One of the city’s scouts rounds the brick wall they are sheltering behind. He goes to yell for his friends, thinks the better of it, and stabs Kumiko clean through with a sharp, curved blade. He drags it across her belly, making a wide cut there. Blood bubbles and steams in the cold air. Kumiko clutches her stomach uselessly, eyes wide and teary. The scout looks shocked; he is an adolescent, his blue face going milky with panic and adrenaline.

“Fuckin’ time loop,” Kumiko manages before she slumps on the ground, crumples in on herself, and Aroa feels the warp of time pulling her apart and together again.

* * *

“Remember the time loop?” Kumiko is eighty-seven. She has beat cancer and aliens, an angry mob of French peasants, some jumped-up lordling on a far-flung planet, but it is this, old age, that has imprisoned her. Her memory fades, mixes things up. She is dying, slowly, and this is the cruelest trick of all.

Still. The time loop.

“Sure,” Aroa says. “I remember that. What a crazy day, huh?” 

They are sitting on the balcony in Kumiko’s New Berlin apartment. She decided to come home to die, like homesick pigeons seeking direction. They are on the fortieth floor, tall enough to see over the array of houses and parks, the wash of solar panels dotted here and there--and, in the distance, the spaceport. There’s a rocket due in several minutes and they are awaiting its launch.

“We had some fun, right?” Kumiko says. She’s probably forgotten.

“Yes,” Aroa urges, “we’ve had lots of good times. Though I’m worried that you consider dying over and over again to be _fun_.”

Kumiko gives a dry laugh and for a moment it is as if she has returned to her, her dearest friend, her love throughout the ages, not ravaged by the cruelty of time, her brain still young and joyful.

* * *

“Wait!” Aroa tries, but the guard runs them both through with the same pike. Dying hurts in a mortal body. The pain swallows her up before she can protest further.

* * *

They first meet when Kumiko is eighteen. She has graduated top of her class and is beginning her degree in timeline manipulation. Her first task, appointed by her seminar professor, is to travel back in time to the last ice age and place a kevlar token somewhere in the snow. She must then return to the present, retrieve her token, and construct a speech about what, if anything, went wrong.

Aroa is drawing on the walls of some dark cave, sodden with moisture and lit from without by the dying sun. She is in her natural state, a shimmery opalescent bundle of radiation some ten metres in diameter. 

She sees the human. Humans have not frequented these caves in generations, but still, the human approaches. She is not dressed like the paleolithic people. She wears a red polo shirt, a blue skirt, a pair of black combat boots. She wears a lanyard around her neck, and her dorm key hangs placidly there.

Aroa knows that looking upon her for too long will hurt her mortal eyesight, not to mention the radiation sickness, and so she curates herself into a shape more familiar. She adopts dark hair, dark eyes, skin well-loved by the sun. 

“Hello?” says Kumiko, who has watched the whole thing. “Are you…?” but the sentence hangs there, empty.

“I’m sorry.” Aroa has had millenia to prepare her first words to her soulmate, but in the moment it just comes out all burbled. “I mean--I’m sorry you had to see that, I-I--”

“What _are_ you?” 

Aroa has to remind herself, she is fifteen, a child adrift from time.

“I’m a goddess. Does that worry you?”

Kumiko shrugs. “I’ve just travelled in time for the first time. So you’re a goddess. Why not?”

Aroa looks upon her, perhaps for too long. _Hello,_ she thinks, _there you are._

“Where are you from?” Kumiko continues.

Aroa gestures up to the sky outside, the stars, the planets beyond. “Around…”

“You’re not Russian are you? They said they were sending Russians too, but we didn’t believe them.”

“I am not.”

“Chinese? You don’t look Chinese.”

“I am… from elsewhere.” She knows how this conversation will go, how it has always gone. This is Kumiko at the very start of her journey through time. She does not want to overwhelm her. “I’m… non-corporeal.”

Kumiko laughs. “Sure you are.”

She doesn’t believe her. How odd. Aroa will spend forever retelling their story.

* * *

“I’m trying to help you!” she yells. “Surely you’ve realised something isn’t right?” 

The soldier freezes as if she has struck him. He has not considered this.

He babbles something in a language unknown to her, but it shares similarities with the other languages of this solar system, a complicated dialect almost. She gets the general gist. It is not pleasant. He waves his sword at them, a glittering thing made of pure light sculpted to a fine point. It will hurt, when he stabs her.

“Invaders!” he yells.

Aroa sighs. She can be patient. She has lived for eons, after all. “No,” she starts, “we’re trapped here, just like you.” Her speech is stilted, trying to work out what vocabulary this man’s dialects shares with its parent language.

The man understands. He points his sword at the portal behind them. “You came… through?”

“Yes,” she nods, “we’re from far away, and long ago, but that’s besides the point. I can help you fix this.”

“Fix?”

“The time loop? Surely it hasn’t escaped your notice?”

He lowers the sword, and Aroa breathes at last. Kumiko is glancing back and forth, oblivious, lost in translation.

“We step through the portal,” Aroa explains, “and then we die. Then we step through the portal _again._ You see? Time loop.” The man, though he is more of a boy, gets a look of utter seriousness on his blue face. Either he believes her, or he has decided she is mortally stupid.

“Come,” he says, and makes a following gesture.

“Erm,” Kumiko says as he tries to tug Aroa across the battlefield. “What about the rest of the soldiers?” They have swords of their own, and pikes, and high-tech guns that glint in the low light of the two setting suns.

Aroa relays this message, and the boy points to his ear where a small communications device is nestled. They must have heard the whole thing.

“Ah. Excellent. Very well, take us to your leader.”

He does just that, half-dragging them both by the sleeves, weaving through the assorted soldiers who gawp at them, half-awe, half-disgust. They are not keen on foreign visitors, Aroa can tell.

They approach the black shiny castle, for it is a castle now Aroa is up close enough to tell. There are turrets and balustrades and a real drawbridge over a moat of silvery-looking jelly-type liquid. She does not concern herself with the details.

Her new friend knocks on the main door and speaks to the guard on the other side in such rapid language that she cannot follow. Something about the time loop, and the portal, and that’s all she needs to know.

“You may enter,” he tells her. The door swings open as if on cue, spilling out light from the foyer beyond. 

The walls are more black stone inlaid with diamond, she can almost taste it, stolen diamonds from beyond the portal. 

“This is why you’re in trouble,” she says, easily. “You’re pissing off the wrong god, and all for sub-par interior design?”

“Trophies,” the boy dismisses them. “We earned them. Spoils of war.”

“You can’t wage war against a _god._ ” But he does not want to listen. He continues pulling them through the foyer, down a corridor, searching for a particular door at the very end. Kumiko’s mouth is hanging open. She has never seen such riches. Aroa has to remind herself that this is Kumiko’s first alien planet. It is not the impression she wanted for her.

The door at the end of the corridor swings open by itself, folding into the wall with a smooth sound. Inside is a large table surrounded by men and women in various shades of blue, bending over figures laid out on the table. A war room, she realises, planning their invasion.

The boy speaks in rapid fire words to a man of utter navy skin, evidently the boss. The darker the skin, she realises, the higher up the person. It is an efficient system. The boy, with his pale milky skin, bows his way out of the room, abandoning Aroa and Kumiko to the others.

“You are…” the boss begins, then chews on his words some. “You are helpers, yes?”

“Yes! I want to help you break the time loop.”

“Good. We are victims here, doomed to play out the same war over and over.”

“I don’t think it’s as black and white as that,” she says placidly. “Surely you realise how deeply you’ve insulted the entity that lives beyond the portal?”

“Perhaps,” he says this as though it pains him. “Perhaps.”

“And anyway, time has become unhinged. I can feel it. It rather tickles. The time loop resets at a different point for each person, namely the moment of their deaths. So really there are about a thousand time loops, each one feeding off the others, woven like knotted thread on a ruined loom.”

“Loom?”

“It’s just an analogy. One I thought you would appreciate, but no matter. The point is, time is tangled up in itself. It is an easy enough fix, but not until you give the god beyond the portal what it wants.”

“We give nothing to that beast,” he snarls. “Nothing!”

Aroa summons the last of her diplomacy. “Y’know, normally I would leave you to your fate, since you seem so resistant to help, but it just so happens that we’re stuck in this damn loop too, somehow. The creature that lives on the other side of the portal wants reparations. Namely, for you lot to stop poaching all his minerals. And a confession of love, but I think that one’s our responsibility.” Minor gods were fickle things, given to flights of fancy. It must have sensed the connection between the two of them.

The leader laughs. “We have been preparing for a mighty cause. We cannot stop now.”

“What kind of preparations could you possibly do with gold and diamonds? And--” she scans her brain. “Oh. Uranium.”

He steeples his fingers as though he has just played the winning move in a particularly arduous game of chess. “We are at war,” he shrugs, “twice over. One with the demon beyond the portal. One with the demons the other side of the planet. They are scum,” he claps his hands together twice, and the others in the room copy him. An odd superstition, but she has seen worse.

Kumiko has been watching this whole exchange with an expression of vague interest, and mounting confusion.

“What,” she says, “the fuck is going on?”

“They’re arming themselves for nuclear war.”

“I guess the glow sticks weren’t working for them?”

“Apparently not.”

The leader motions for them to sit down, and Kumiko does so with a sigh of relief. Aroa remains standing.

“I’m not here to tell you how to fight your battles,” she explains, “though I think you’re making a terrible mistake. But I am here to fix the time loop, and the reason for the time loop is that you’ve pissed off this god. How did you even form the portal in the first place?”

“A tear in space,” he says it as though it is nothing. “An unhealed wound we keep open with frequent travel. We ought to send a missile through to see this god of yours off.”

“No! That would be a monumentally bad idea. Gods are not mortal, they can’t exactly die. You’d just piss him off further.”

“All men may die,” he scowls.

She rolls her eyes. She can tell, with the wisdom of all her infinities, that there is no reasoning with these people. Wars are heady things, she knows, they have a way of perpetuating themselves. She does not have to concern herself with this one.

“Whatever.” she says. “Do what you like. It won’t end well for you, that’s all.” She cannot intervene in every petty dispute the universe coughs up for her--else she would spend forever doing it. That is no way to live. “I just want to end the time loop, don’t you?”

He considers this. He moves to murmur something to the woman by his side, a woman with royal blue skin and something akin to glitter dashed across her jawline. The woman whispers rapidly back in a dialect Aroa cannot follow.

“Yes,” the man decides eventually. “We will end this loop, and continue on with our conquest. Will our new weapons, and the ships they can power, we can conquer more than this lowly planet.”

Aroa has seen space-faring species, has long known the creatures that travel long distances in search of glory, and they all of them possess a quality, a kind of innocent curiosity. These people are not curious; they are salivating. And they’ve gone nuclear.

“Fine. You need to stop sending men through the portal. Be happy with what you’ve got.”

“Absolutely not.”

Aroa throws up her hands. She pulls Kumiko to her feet. “C’mon, we’re leaving.”

“No.” The leader brandishes his sword of light, activating it via a clicker on the hilt. It pulses white and blue, wobbling with power. “You stay.” Kumiko sits back down, looking back and forth between them, trying to discern what is happening.

“No, we go--” and Aroa is about to remind him about the damn time loop that kicks in when someone dies, but he reaches forwards and slits her throat with the beam of light, severing an artery or two, and blood showers down onto Kumiko’s face. Fuck.

* * *

Kumiko plays the piano. Aroa plays the piano too, but badly, out of coordination with human hands, and so she is content to watch Kumiko play. Her hands are gnarled with age and arthritic but they dance along the black-and-white with such ease, such practised curated skill. She plays a trilling arpeggio, a flight of fancy up an octave, and Aroa nods because yes, this, this is how the universe was written.

“You play beautifully,” Aroa says, because it’s true.

“I play methodically,” Kumiko laughs. “My parents bought me enough upgrades over the years to play at a semi-professional level. We didn’t have much money, but they wanted me to have a skill. They gave me the chips for my birthday, Christmas, Hanukkah, even Samhain.”

It was a weird day when Aroa discovered the humans were putting actual chips into their actual brains. An eternity of existence, and this is what surprises her, the soft slope of Kumiko’s gentle hands, the strength of a chord ringing through her mortal body, the blood and the cells pulling ever towards the sound.

“Y’know, planets sing.”

“What?”

“In deep space, you can hear it, like a roaring song, a convergence of gravity and sound waves. Even the uninhabited ones, even the bolides and the moons.”

Kumiko pauses the music. “Oh.”

* * *

She’s on the other side of the portal, and this time she does not step through. She grips Kumiko’s hand.

“Okay?”

Kumiko shudders. “Getting your throat slit _hurts._ ”

“Yeah. It pinches. Let's… explore this side of the portal for a while. I want to talk with this god.”

They turn away from the battlefield with its dry purple grass, putting their backs to the castle that lurks in the distance. Through the gap in space and time, they can hear the blue-people carrying on with their battle, fighting amongst themselves, dying and living and dying again.

The world beyond the portal is strange. Everything is black, there seems to be no real sky or ground, everything sort of blurs together. Aroa has been on anti-gravity planets, gas giants, hunks of rocks with little in the way of atmosphere, but this place still gives her pause. She suspects it is more of a pocket realm, a convergence, than a planet proper. 

There is something floating in the air around their knees, little glowy white halos that flicker when they come near.

Kumiko reaches into her pocket and pulls free the handheld device. It lights up, illuminating several feet of the gloom. There is not much to see.

“Atmosphere is uranium hexafluoride, humidity is eighty-three per cent. Thank god for the spacesuits.”

“Thank someone,” Aroa warns, “but probably not this god.”

“Right. Also, there’s a significant amount of neon gas in the atmosphere.”

“Hence the halos.” Aroa plucks at one now, settling it into the palm of her hand. It is heavy but unstable. “Y’know,” she says, “maybe you should hang back. Maybe I should go alone, talk to this guy, god to god, y’know?”

“Where you go, I go.” Humans are impossibly stubborn.

“Whatever, but if you get killed--”

“Again?”

“Just… let me do the talking.”

“I thought the blue guys were fighting creatures that came out the portal? Where are they all?”

Aroa glances around, but the whole planet seems still, paused. “We’re in another dimension,” she guesses, “a little bubble of paused time and space.”

She shucks her mortal body, dissolves her human form into brilliant yellowish light that illuminates even more of the dimension. She has roughly an hour until the radiation gets too much for Kumiko, and she mumbles for her not to look directly upon her, lest her eyes boil in their sockets and dribble down her face like putty.

There is a throne at the far end, and on it sits a young haggard man, hair in his face, a solitary figure in the empty landscape. A god. She can smell it, leaking from his mortal pores. It is a thing impossible to mask.

“You don’t have to hide,” she tells him, in English. “I’m… _divine_ too. And this is Kumiko.”

“Greetings, divine and Kumiko.”

“I’m not divine,” Kumiko laughs uneasily, and Aroa thinks that’s a matter of opinion.

“Are you here to kill me?” He sounds bored, like maybe this sort of thing happens often.

“No, we’re not affiliated with the… blues. We’re a third party. Neutral.”

The man breathes a sigh of relief. He looks so very tired, like a man who has been fighting for quite some time. 

“They will not relent,” he complains. “They are… persistent.”

“I gathered that. I tried to reason with them, truly, I did.”

“You did what I could not.”

Aroa shrugs. “So, you trapped them in this time loop?”

“Yes. A trap of my own design, though not one I have much power over, I’m afraid. I am known for being rather… weak, among my kin.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Aroa gestures around, back at the portal from whence they came. “This seems like rather advanced magic. I’ve seen many gods, little petty gods, impotent creatures, but this is rather fantastic.”

“Wait,” Kumiko interjects. “Magic? I thought it was science?”

Aroa and the man look at one another in common exasperation as if to say: _can you believe this?_ He smiles, and she sees the god in him, just beneath the surface. He is a kind fellow. She has a feeling.

“You could have just killed them,” she says. “Many others would. Just be rid of them. Call it a punishment for stealing from you. But you didn’t. You trapped them in a time loop, giving them infinite chances to redeem themselves. You gave them a choice.”

“And what good did that do?” he asks. “They are not the kind of people to see the kindness in that. I am an enemy to be defeated. We are at war, but I never wanted this.”

“I know, I know. But the thing is: you trapped us, too. I’m not sure how it happened, maybe our journeys interjected at just the right moment, but it did. We’re stuck.”

“I never meant for that,” he sounds genuinely apologetic. 

“Can you free us?”

He falters. There’s a little twitch in his left eyebrow, an odd tic for a god who has complete control of his mortal form. “I… don’t know how.”

“What?” Kumiko gasps. “You created this damn thing and now you can’t get us out?”

“Kumiko,” Aroa says gently. “ _Darling._ Let me handle this.”

“I didn’t plan that far ahead!” he protests.

“Listen,” she tells him, “I know time. The ins and outs, the twists and turns--all of it runs through my every cell. And I know this, though it is not of my design. It is, perhaps, an aberration, a scar upon the universe--but no matter. Every scar has a weakness, and yours is love.”

“Love?” he sounds disgusted, and Aroa chuckles.

“Yes. I don’t know why, but love is the tool we can use to pry this scar of yours open. It will bleed, maybe, but then it will heal. Understand?”

“No,” but he waves his hand as though he is long past caring. “Do what you will. What must I do?”

“You must hear our confession of love, and believe it.”

“Right. I believe it already.”

“You do?” Kumiko speaks up. “I mean, I love her, but I didn’t think it was obvious.”

“I am a god,” he growls, “though I am powerless compared to your personal deity here. But I do still have some magics available to me, and I can see all that you will be, Kumiko Hayashi of New Berlin planet Earth, child adrift from time, star-stroller, bringer of victory. You are a true warrior. The heart of a star burns within you. You will be magnificent.”

Aroa looks sideways at Kumiko. That’s what she’s been saying. It is hard, when one knows the end of the story, not to spoil it. Kumiko smiles a little, only half-believing what he’s saying.

“So you can see my future?”

“Yes. Both of your futures, together and apart. She loves you. She has always loved you, since she first met you eons ago, since she first met you half a decade ago. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Kumiko says.

“Some things,” Aroa interjects, “are eternal. Some things are written among the matter, set in motion before the big bang spat me into being. We gods can read these things like you can read code on a computer, like a choir reading from a song sheet.”

“Oh. Nice. I love you too, then. Do you believe that?”

“I know it to be true. I have been waiting for it to be true for a million years. I am glad we are together, Kumiko.”

Kumiko turns to look at her, blinking at the harsh light of her natural form. She is something akin to a supernova, forever burning, and mortals cannot look too long before going blind. Kumiko squints, but she also smiles.

“So, the time loop is broken?”

The god closes his eyes briefly, convening with his thoughts. “Yes,” he says at length, “for the two of you, anyway. My battle with the warriors rages on, and I think it will go on for quite some time yet. I cannot foresee an end, at any rate.”

“Some things are written,” Aroa repeats, “and the tenacity of mortals is one such thing.”

“Have you seen the end of it?”

She has. It does not end well, no matter how many verses she tweaks, how many words she rearranges. They are tenacious, yes, and that is their downfall. It is fate; it is written. They will consume the resources of the worlds beyond the portal, and then it will consume them in return.

“It is a sad story,” says Aroa, and does not elaborate.

The god sighs. “Then let some good come of it. Go, both of you. Go now.”

Aroa shuffles back into mortal form and, with the light gone, the god fades into the black. She grips Kumiko’s hand tight. It will not do to be separated here. She tugs her back towards the portal, the only light in this dimension, a flicking purple source of energy.

It is warm when they approach. Aroa lets it swallow her up and, in the swallowing, she summons time around her like a dress to be twirled in front of a mirror. She lets it settle around her and Kumiko, pulling at the individual threads until they are back in thirty-thirty New Berlin, in Tiergarten, ankle deep in wet grass, the river babbling on beside them.

“So,” she says, her head spinning from the exertion. “How did you like your first alien planet?”

“Terrible,” Kumiko pronounces. “Absolutely terrible.” She dusts off her hands as though it were something physical stuck to her skin.

“Would you like to see more?”

“Yes,” she says, without hesitation. _Of course._ Aroa knew she would.


End file.
